The Aphorisms of the VGHVI School of Athens

This page serves as an index to our developing ideas about the concepts that underpin the intersection of video games and human values. If you’d like to add an aphorism, let Roger know.

Roger Travis:

metaphoric presence: the impression of being elsewhere that results from sensory stimuli enabling performance within a ruleset or part of a ruleset that projects an identity for the player within a metaphorically-conceived-as-realistic play-space.

practomimetic boundary-maintenance: practices within a practomime that tend to reinforce the demarcation of the zone of play; these practices are highly analogous to corresponding practices in other cultural zones, e.g. zones of work.

immersion: experience of removal into a fictive situation, in practomimetic performance, through a fluid identification with elements of the fiction.

“Learning is always learning to play.”

practomime: performance in a cultural zone regulated for play, including most notably games and stories.

ruleset: the constraints placed upon a specific instance of practomime as a specific expression of the authority vested in the particular cultural zone in which the practomime occurs that create the possibility-space of the practomime and so enable the performance

mimesis (μίμησις): performance as another subject.

fiction: imaginary situation created by practomimetic performance.

play: act in a cultural zone understood as not immediately affecting material circumstances.

game: instance of play.

story: instance of narrative.

narrative: enactment through representational means, in an appropriate cultural zone, of a series of events that took place in another cultural zone, or are imagined so to have taken place, to be taking place, or to be going to take place. That enactment occurs according to a ruleset proper to the zone, which makes narrative a species of practomime (ruleset-guided activity in a zone regulated for play).

gamespace/possibility-space: range of performance affordances created by a practomimetic ruleset, conceived as one or more of a variety of spatial metaphors readily afforded by human consciousness.

metaphor: the replacement of one signifier by another signifier in an act of discourse in such a way as to elaborate an imaginary connection (that is, a connection through those signifiers’ signifieds) between them.